Faith/History/Fading of the Truth
|text= Fading of the Truth Objective world: Once upon a time, a very long time ago, the world was truly and fully objective: the world was as it was, all space and energy and matter, and no mind. The world had been this way for an inconceivably long time, millions, billions of years; for without sentience, there was none to alter reality to the contrary. Life: In this world life began as a result of pure chance, first minuscule and simple and crude, and life divided itself, and so multiplied. And time worked miracles of chance on life, so that it grew and became complex, and became all the species of the world: of life too small to see, of plants, and of animals. Man and Sentience: Then man arose, evolved, from animals similar but not quite like him; and time worked miracles of chance on him also, so that the minds of each new generation of man became more awake to himself. And so over the aeons - hundreds of thousands of years ago - man came to gain his sentience. Truth and Belief: And with his sentience, man came to believe in his existence, to believe in the things of the world, and to believe that he believed. The more he became aware, the more he accepted and believed true, and the more he ignored and believed false. And as he did so, so the truth flowed: it drained away from the reality he didn’t know, and all the reality which he rejected, ceased to be. And it flowed into the reality he knew; and all the reality which he believed, came to be. And so it is that our sentience - the very thing that allows us to acknowledge the truth - is also the very thing that has hidden the truth, and changed it, so that we may never know the truth. We may only guess at it based on what we believe. What is Knowable: And what man knew, was the truth: all the truths and all the laws of reality that he could know of the world that had once been, of what he could see and sense and deduce. And so those alone of the original reality were preserved through the chaos of faith, to guide the realities of posterity. But of that which was too large or too small, too far away or too well hidden, too long past or had yet to come, all this he could not sense, and so were lost to ignorance and chaos, and their truth ceased to be. Control of Belief: Now it is important to understand, that man recognized only what he truly believed to be reality. Not a one had the power to shape all of reality at a whim, for man cannot so easily fool himself as to what he believes. This we codify as the rule of no self-deception. And so the truths of the objective world were, by and large, either kept or lost, and only rarely made anew. Theory of Mind: Next born of sentience was the theory of mind, that other people are sentient as oneself. And as man believed it was thus, so it was thus; and all the children of man are alike in sentience, and share that theory of mind; that all minds may have sentience, and not all the other matter in the world. }}